One Industry, Five Different Jobs: TV vs. Theater vs. Festivals vs. Circus vs. Live Events

People ask me sometimes what I do for work and I tell them I work in live event production and they nod in a way that suggests they have formed a picture in their head, and the picture is usually one of two things: either a concert with a very large lighting rig, or a wedding with a very large floral arrangement. Both of those exist within this industry and I have worked adjacent to both of them and neither of them fully captures what I'm talking about, which is part of why I started this blog.

The broader truth is that "live event production" is not one job. It is a family of jobs that share DNA and vocabulary and a certain baseline tolerance for chaos, but which are culturally and operationally distinct in ways that matter enormously when you're actually doing the work. I have worked in most of these worlds — television, theater, festival, circus, live events — and moving between them requires a kind of code-switching that took me years to get comfortable with.

Let me map them for you.

**Television Production.**

Television has the most codified structure of any production environment I've worked in, and I mean that as a compliment. The union jurisdictions are clear. The call sheet is dense with information. The hierarchy is explicit and mostly respected. Everyone knows their lane and the lanes are enforced, sometimes aggressively — on a union television set, there are specific things that specific crafts do and you do not do those things if you are not in that craft, full stop, regardless of whether you technically know how. This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is the accumulated wisdom of an industry that learned through painful experience what happens when everyone tries to do everything.

The pace is different from live events in a way that surprises people when they cross over for the first time. Television moves slowly by live event standards — hours of setup for minutes of camera time, meticulous attention to details that a live audience would never notice, a kind of precision that is genuinely impressive and also, if you are used to festival pace, occasionally maddening. I have worked on CSI, SWAT, the Golden Globes, the Oscars Red Carpet. These are different animals from each other but they share the DNA of the union television set: structured, precise, slow by some standards, and absolutely unforgiving of the person who doesn't know the rules.

The money is usually better. The craft services are usually better. The porta-potties are usually better. These things matter on a long call.

**Regional Theater.**

Theater was where I started and it will always feel like home in the specific way that the place you learned a thing feels like home — slightly complicated, deeply familiar, full of memories of doing it wrong. Regional theater runs on a combination of union stagecraft and genuine love for the work, because nobody goes into regional theater because the money is extraordinary. You go because you care about the craft.

The technical demands of theater are their own world. Repertory houses running multiple shows in rotation are a particular kind of operational puzzle — you are storing multiple shows' worth of scenery and props and flying hardware and you are switching between them on an aggressive schedule, and you know this building, this fly system, this loading dock, this quirky counterweight arbor that always sticks on the third leg, with an intimacy that you never develop with a venue you're visiting once for a load-in. Theater is the discipline that taught me to read a ground plan, to understand sightlines, to think about the audience's experience from every seat in the house. That's knowledge I carry into every other context I work in.

The pace is deliberate. Tech rehearsals are long and slow and occasionally theological in their intensity. The relationship between the technical departments and the artistic team is closer and more collaborative than in most other production contexts — in theater the director is in the room with you, often for weeks, and the show changes around you as it gets made. You are not executing a finished vision. You are part of making the vision.

**Festival Production.**

Festival production is where most of my recent life has lived and it is, genuinely, its own entire civilization. The scale ranges from intimate regional gatherings with a few hundred attendees to Burning Man, which is a temporary city of eighty thousand people built in a desert and struck in two weeks, and which has its own infrastructure, its own culture, its own operational logic that has almost nothing in common with a theater call and only passing resemblance to a television set.

Festival production moves fast and improvises constantly. You are often building in environments that are actively hostile — desert heat, rain, wind, mud, dust that gets into everything including gear that was not designed to have dust get into it. The union rules that govern a Hollywood set often do not apply, which means everyone can do more things, which is both liberating and occasionally chaotic. The hierarchy is looser. The communication is more lateral. The vibe — and I use that word deliberately — is a factor in a way that it simply isn't on a television set.

I have done transportation with Do Lab at Lightning in a Bottle, which involves moving an extraordinary amount of infrastructure across a festival site with the specific logic of an operation that has done this many times and knows exactly how. I have lead-rigged for Lucent Dossier's full aerial opera installation at Burning Man, which is building a sophisticated performance rig in the middle of a desert during a windstorm while also being part of a community and a culture and an event that is unlike anything else on earth. These are the same job title and they are completely different experiences.

The money is more variable than television. The experience is, for certain kinds of people — and I am clearly one of them — irreplaceable.

**Circus and Aerial.**

Circus production is a niche within a niche and I love it with my whole chest. The technical demands of rigging for aerial performance are specific and serious — you are building systems that human bodies will fly through, and the margin for error is not a margin at all, it is zero, because physics does not negotiate. I apprenticed with Icarus Rigging in LA and have been doing aerial rigging in various contexts since. I perform aerial myself. Being on both sides of the rope — the rigger who builds the system and the performer who flies it — gives me a perspective on aerial safety culture that is, I would argue, fairly rare.

Circus production also tends to happen in unusual spaces. A big top tent in a parking lot. A theater that wasn't designed for aerial and requires creative solutions to put a point where you need one. A festival stage with a truss system that was specified for lighting and is now being asked to do something more interesting. The problem-solving that circus demands is some of the most satisfying technical work I do.

**The World of "Live Events."**

This is the catch-all: corporate events, galas, product launches, award shows, conferences, immersive experiences, pop-ups, brand activations. It is the largest sector of the industry by volume and it is the one that gets the least romantic treatment, which is fine, because it is not always romantic. It is, however, consistently interesting in a problem-solving sense, because corporate and brand clients often want things that have never been built before — not for artistic reasons but because the brief says "create an unforgettable experience" and someone has to figure out what that means in a ballroom in four hours.

I've worked the Oscars Red Carpet, which is the live events world colliding with the television world in a very particular way. I've worked WWE RAW, which is its own genre entirely — live event production meets television production meets professional wrestling meets an audience that is very much part of the show. Every context has its own rules and its own culture and its own version of what "professional" means.

The skill that all of it requires, underneath everything else, is adaptability. The ability to walk into a new context, read it quickly, understand which rules apply and which don't, and do good work within whatever structure you find. That's the job. In all five worlds and all the spaces between them.

That's always the job.

— Dots

How to Read a Call Sheet (And What It's Really Telling You)

How to Read a Call Sheet (And What It's Really Telling You)"

The call sheet is a piece of paper — or a PDF, we live in the future — that tells everyone on a production when they are expected to be where, doing what, with whom. On its surface it is a scheduling document. Below the surface it is a personality test, an org chart, a threat assessment, and a direct window into the mind of whoever built the production. I have been reading call sheets for two decades and I can tell you more about a production from its call sheet than from any conversation with its producer.

Let me show you what I mean.

**The basic anatomy.**

A call sheet has, at minimum: the date, the venue or location, the general call time (when the overall operation begins), the specific call times for each department or position, and some version of the day's schedule — what's happening when, in what order. On a television production you'll also have a scene breakdown, a cast schedule, weather, and a frankly alarming amount of fine print. In live events, the format is more variable but the bones are the same. Who. When. Where. What.

The first thing I look at is the spread between the earliest call and the latest call. If the riggers are called at 6am and the doors open at 8pm, that's a fourteen-hour spread and someone has built a reasonable cushion into the day. If the riggers are called at 8am and the doors open at 7pm, that's an eleven-hour spread for the same show, which means whoever scheduled this is optimistic in a way that I find professionally alarming. Not impossible — I've made eleven-hour spreads work — but you're driving the whole day with no margin, and margin is the difference between a show that goes up on time and a show that goes up with everyone running.

**What the department order tells you.**

Departments are listed in the order they arrive, which should be the order they're needed, which should reflect a thoughtful understanding of how the load-in sequences. Riggers first, then electrics and audio, then video and scenic, then the departments that need the other departments to be done before they can do their thing. If you see audio called before rigging, either the audio is all ground-stacked and there's no hang, or whoever built this call sheet is working from a template they didn't think too carefully about.

Either way, now you know something.

**The notes section.**

Every call sheet has notes. The notes are where the production manager puts everything that doesn't fit in a box. "Please use the back entrance, main entrance is in use for a separate event." "Load-in crew must wear hi-vis at all times, venue requirement." "Catering is in the green room, which is on the second floor, which does not have an elevator, please plan accordingly." The notes are the shadow show behind the show — the logistics and complications and special circumstances that don't fit in the schedule but will absolutely affect your day if you don't know about them.

Read the notes. Read them again. There is always a person on every call who did not read the notes and this person has a very long day.

**What the meal breaks tell you.**

Union calls have contractually mandated meal breaks at specific intervals. Non-union calls should still have meal breaks at sensible intervals because human beings need to eat and they become significantly worse at their jobs when they don't, which is a thing that some producers understand deeply and some producers understand only in theory. A call sheet with no meal break scheduled is either a short call (fine) or a very long call where someone has decided to handle the food question by leaving it vague (not fine). Vague is not a meal plan. Vague is how you end up with a crew that had a granola bar at 7am and it is now 3pm and the load-out hasn't started yet.

On a well-run call, the meal break is on the call sheet with a location and a duration. On a poorly-run call, the meal break is "TBD" and the TBD gets resolved by someone eventually going on a food run while everyone else keeps working, which is technically a solution and also genuinely bad production.

**The contact sheet.**

Attached to or incorporated into most call sheets is a contact list — who the department heads are, how to reach them, sometimes who the venue contacts are and what the production office number is. This is where I look to understand who I'm working with. If I recognize names — good ones, people I've worked with before, people whose reputations I've heard about — I know something about what to expect from the day. If I don't recognize anyone, I'm in information-gathering mode from the moment I walk in the door.

And if the contact sheet is missing entirely? If the call sheet doesn't tell me who the production manager is or how to reach them or who to call if something goes wrong? That tells me something too. It tells me that this is a production that doesn't yet know what it doesn't know, and I will proceed accordingly, which means I will be very pleasant and I will ask a lot of questions and I will build my own mental map of who runs what because the paperwork isn't going to do it for me.

**The version number.**

Good call sheets have a version number and a timestamp. Call Sheet v1 goes out the night before. Call Sheet v2 goes out at 6am when something has changed. Call Sheet v3 goes out at 9am when the thing that changed in v2 has changed again. If you're on Call Sheet v5 by noon, the show is either very complex or very chaotic or both, and you should pace yourself accordingly.

If the call sheet has no version number, it was built by someone who has never had to send a correction and doesn't yet know that they will. They'll know soon. We all learn eventually.

The call sheet is just paper. But paper made by humans reveals the humans who made it, every time, without fail. Learn to read it right and you'll know what kind of day you're walking into before you walk through the door.

— Dots

"My Resume Doesn't Make Sense and That's the Point"

Someone asked me once to walk them through my career trajectory. This was at a party, which was already a mistake — production people do not give short answers about anything — but I took a breath and I started: Americorps in Brooklyn, theater in New England, campaign trail in Florida, rigging apprenticeship in LA under Icarus Rigging, clown training under Cirque du Soleil's former head clown, the Oscars, the Golden Globes, CSI, SWAT, Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Burning Man lead rigger for a full circus aerial opera, festival circuit up and down the west coast, Cowboy Carter Tour build, Do Lab's transport team, full time van life, and now this blog.

By the time I got to the part about the bearded lady character with Crash Alchemy at SXSW, the person I was talking to had the look of someone trying to determine if I was making the whole thing up. I was not making any of it up. This is just what a production career looks like if you follow it honestly rather than trying to make it look like something that fits in a LinkedIn headline.

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're coming up: there is no ladder. There's a jungle gym, and about half the handholds are missing, and the whole structure is slightly on fire, and you will absolutely love it once you stop expecting it to make sense.

A traditional career has a shape. You start somewhere, you move up, you accrue titles and salary bands and a 401k contribution that someone will explain to you at an orientation that you're too tired to absorb. That's not this. In production, what you accrue is skill, reputation, and a truly staggering number of phone numbers. The trajectory is lateral as often as it is vertical. Some years I've made great money doing television work on Hollywood union calls. Some years I've been the weirdo in a wig doing performance at a festival for a percentage of the gate and a wristband. Both of those years taught me things the other couldn't.

The work is not one thing. It is never one thing. It is rigging in the morning and scenic carpentry in the afternoon and performing at night and driving through the desert at 3am because load-out went long and you've got another call in a different state in eleven hours. It is knowing how to read a load rating and also how to read a room. It is understanding the union rules on a television set and also understanding that there are no union rules at a festival and knowing which set of instincts to apply where.

What holds all of it together is not a job title. It's a set of skills that transfer, and a reputation for showing up and figuring it out, and knowing enough people who will answer the phone when you call. That's the whole career. That's what twenty years of it looks like.

I'm writing this blog partly because I think there are people out there who are doing this work or trying to get into it and they're confused about why nobody seems to have a clean story about how they got here. And the answer is that the clean story is a lie. The real story looks like mine — weird, sprawling, occasionally baffling from the outside, completely legible if you understand the logic of a life that follows the work.

The logic, if it helps, is this: do the thing you're good at and curious about. Do it somewhere slightly bigger and slightly harder than what you did before. Do it with people who are better than you so you can figure out what better looks like. Do not say no to a gig because you don't know exactly what you're doing yet — figure it out and be honest about what you know and don't know, and most of the time that will be enough. Take care of your body, because this industry will use it up if you let it. And never, under any circumstances, complain about the catering within earshot of the catering coordinator.

The resume doesn't make sense because it was never meant to. It was meant to describe a life that moved toward the work, every time, without apology. That's all it is. That's enough.

— Dots